“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach her/him to learn by creating curiosity, (s)he will continue the learning process as long as (s)he lives.”
Clay P. Bedford
Leaders understand the importance of ongoing growth and learning not only for themselves but equally for the culture of their organization. Humanity by nature needs to continue to grow and develop. It is easy to forget the importance of creating new opportunities to learn when others see it as change or more work.
Here are a few tips to creating a learning environment:
Embrace mistakes – team members will make mistakes and when they do, don’t punish them, take the time to teach and show them a better way. Mistakes become teaching moments. Find these moments early and often.
Encourage best practice updates – people will learn not only from you but from others and the world. Create an environment where your team members are eager to share new techniques which are providing more success, ease, effectiveness, creativity, vitality, etc.
Be a learning environment – unleash curiosity and the love of learning by embracing new information, exploring what it means to the team and the work you do, identifying how to use the new knowledge within the existing framework, paying the learning and best practices forward so others can excel as well, and turning peers into teachers.
Mission success – ask your team to find the new knowledge, tools or best practices which catalyzes even better success for the mission and overall company. Engage your team as hunters of the “best practices” which allow even better success. Challenge your team to look at each phase of the project with this question, “what don’t we know, that if we did know would make this phase even more successful?”
Creating a love of learning and hunters of the best knowledge, advancing techniques, and the desire to gain and practice new skills will build an unstoppable team.
“(Wo)Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
